Streets Of Poison: The Toxic Legacy Of Louisiana

[n2doc]

BY CHARLES PIERCE



For the most carefree place on earth, New Orleans also seems to be a place of almost fathomless human misery. Even before Hurricane Katrina upended almost every institution of the city except for its gaudy tourist economy, the combination of poverty, disease, corruption, environmental catastrophe and urban neglect were as much of a tradition in the place as cornet music and vomiting college juniors. Even the best intentions seem often to end up in horrific tragedy.

Several decades ago, the city was trying to give poor people housing options besides the city's overcrowded public housing projects. So they built a couple of new neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward. It seemed like a good idea at the time for the people who moved into the new houses, or sent their kids to the new elementary school. The problems came later when people began to sicken and die.

Davis, whose family was one of the first to move into the community, said she experienced a normal childhood in Press Park. She remembers shooting marbles and playing Double Dutch while her mother spent hours in her garden, tending vegetables to feed her 13 children. But there was something wrong with the land, she said. There was something in the soil that seemed to be making everyone sick. What the city and HANO failed to tell the residents and what the School Board failed to tell the families of Moton Elementary School is that just a few feet below the grass was 20 feet of compacted industrial waste riddled with 49 cancer-causing chemicals.

You know what's coming, right? Endless stonewalling from the city. Lawsuits. Terribly ill plaintiffs. Furious judges.

Ramsey blasted the city for lying to the residents and doing "virtually nothing to address the fact that there are citizens of this city, in particular, children, the most vulnerable of the population, living on a toxic waste dump," Ramsey wrote. "It was not the plaintiffs who developed low-income housing and a school on a former landfill. (They) were given the promise of the American dream of homeownership wrapped in a poisonous box."

And then, after almost everyone's forgotten the case entirely, a settlement is reached. And, dammit, if there wasn't one more joker in the deck.

Nothing would give her back her health, Davis said, but maybe she could use part of her settlement to start a foundation for poor people struggling with cancer. Maybe she could spend her remaining years traveling the world, trying to make up for the time she lost hooked to machines in various emergency rooms, undergoing countless surgeries and spending hundreds of hours in bed, immobilized with pain. Maybe she could finally forgive, now that it seemed those responsible were trying to make things right. And with those thoughts in her head, Davis said she opened her envelope and looked at the figure: $4,843.15. That works out to $138.37 for each year she lived on a toxic dump. And the worst part, Davis said, is that the money came from a handful of insurance companies that represented the housing authority more than two decades ago. The city and its agencies continue to deny responsibility and refuse to pay the residents.

The history of the site is truly amazing. It was such a vast dump that fires burned in it literally for months. When it became overrun by various bugs and critters, the city dumped gallons in pesticides on top of the poisons already in the ground. In 1969, this was where New Orleans decided to build its new neighborhoods.

more

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a34637/poison-streets/

[truebluegreen]

1. Holy shit. The crap just never ends. nt